What happens if electricity quits working?

In the TV show Revolution, "someone" turned off the electricity. What would be the real world ramifications of this? I'm not talking about your TV, Laptop, car, hydroelectric dam, etc not working; that's a given. And we'll ignore the fact that our bodies need electricity to work.

So, if electricity quit working what would happen, from a physics point of view?

If we shut off the electromagnetic force, the first thing that happens is that you and everything around you dissolves into the air as molecular bonds cease to function. The universe becomes very dark, as photons are electromagnetic. Stars cease to fuse nuclei and will collapse. Electron degeneracy pressure (and other degeneracies) should continue to work (I think) so planets won't collapse, but massive stars will immediately collapse into black holes.

Smaller things in the universe, things that can't collapse into black holes (assuming degeneracy holds out) become amorphous blobs of gas held together by gravity.

If degeneracy pressure doesn't continue working, then everything in the universe with appreciable mass collapses into black holes. Hot things will not, as they have no way of losing heat other than by dispersion and stuff that's disperse doesn't collapse. Eventually, however, all we're doing is fast-forwarding the universe into the black hole era. Everything in the universe is either disperse gas or black hole.

If we shut off the electromagnetic force, the first thing that happens is that you and everything around you dissolves into the air as molecular bonds cease to function. The universe becomes very dark, as photons are electromagnetic. Stars cease to fuse nuclei and will collapse. Electron degeneracy pressure (and other degeneracies) should continue to work (I think) so planets won't collapse, but massive stars will immediately collapse into black holes.

Smaller things in the universe, things that can't collapse into black holes (assuming degeneracy holds out) become amorphous blobs of gas held together by gravity.

If degeneracy pressure doesn't continue working, then everything in the universe with appreciable mass collapses into black holes. Hot things will not, as they have no way of losing heat other than by dispersion and stuff that's disperse doesn't collapse. Eventually, however, all we're doing is fast-forwarding the universe into the black hole era. Everything in the universe is either disperse gas or black hole.

Putting aside MilleniX's good point about the unification of electromagnetism with other known forces, there is a way of losing heat into the vacuum other than EM radiation: neutrino radiation. However, that's really, really slow unless temperatures are in the billions of degrees.

Would not any nuclei simply fuse whenever moving within strong force range of each other? Nuclei would need a lot of recalculation since the energy levels are going to change an awful lot. Would any nucleus be unstable?

I was trying to avoid nuclear reactions, as then you have to consider weak interactions. Given that electromagnetism and the weak force are two aspects of the same thing we go very quickly into "Making shit up" land.

Would we get spontaneous fusion if we removed the Coulomb force? Well neutrinos interact via weak processes, so let's assume we can still make them. We can fuse hydrogen into deuterium, as the extra mass is carried out by a neutrino. We have to stop there, because adding another proton gets us He-3... but also a gamma photon. We can't have those anymore. This means main sequence stars would burn out very quickly once all their hydrogen is deuterium. That's the proton-proton chain, but the CNO cycle is similar, the process gives up gamma from C to N and N to O.

Would any other fusion chains "pick up the slack"?

D+D to set up a helium-3 + D fusion chain, but D+D is just as likely to make T + positron + gamma, so this is forbidden. He-3 has a large cross-section with D and other He-3, but both reactions require gamma production, which we can't do.

We can't fuse beyond helium-3. I imagine that we'd get a cataclysmic burst of fusion in most stars as soon as electromagnetism is removed, but at that point all fusion would cease.

I liked it when Hat only said we "go very quickly into 'Making shit up' land" after he had discussed the implications of disabling electromagnetism. I wanna hear more, whether it's from made up land or not.

ON a similar note, what if everything was super conductive?Or maybe no barriers to electron motion.I would think they could still be be bound to atoms, or would all materials become like metals in that all electrons are shared?I would think they would still be electrically bound to the nucleus of atoms but we would have no way to build charges or to force them to move in predictable ways.